Cloud Hosting Review

Why Use Cloud Hosting?

You’ve been working for months on bringing your latest web startup idea to life; you’ve put in countless hours, a significant amount of your own money, and plenty of sweat and tears. You’re finally ready to release your creation to the public. Is your server prepared for the flood of traffic you’re about to receive?

Cloud hosting services help lay your fears to rest. These specialized platforms make it easy to scale the infrastructure (databases, servers, computer power, storage space, etc.) behind your application or website at a moment’s notice, without a dedicated IT department. The best cloud hosts offer an array of powerful features that give you a great deal of control, are highly flexible and can spin up to handle increased traffic in an instant. And, of course, these cloud hosts make it easy to get your website up and running without server setup, configuration and so on.

Why Use Cloud Hosting Services?

Cloud hosting takes away the pain of setting up and managing servers and replaces it with automated features and a suite of convenient tools. They also make it simple to scale the power behind your application, by splitting the load over several virtual machines and allowing you to create additional instances of your application to be served up in the time it takes you to click a button. We took a look at the cloud hosts on the market and rated them on these specific criteria:

Features
When considering features, we looked at the tools each service offers for managing the structure behind your application, as well as service add-ons like third-party application integration and monitoring. We also gave each hosting service a score quantifying our experience with re-deployment speed.

Scaling & Flexibility
A key feature of an elastic environment like those present in cloud hosting platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments is the ability to scale rapidly. If you get a spike of visitors or signups, you want to be sure your server can handle it. The best cloud hosts can create new instances of your application or discreet background workers in an instant, ready to respond to requests in mere seconds.

Since most cloud application platforms are highly specialized, it’s important to find a cloud host that can serve your specific needs. Whether that means you’re programming in a specific language or you need to deliver large, static assets quickly, the best services cater to a variety of needs.

Ease of Use
Of course, if something promises to remove your reliance on an IT staff, it had better be easy for everyone else to use. The best cloud hosts make their platforms highly available and easy to use, requiring a minimal amount of technical knowledge to get your application running on their infrastructures.

Help & Support
While these services take great pains to make processes self-explanatory, you will still likely run into issues you need help with. We made sure the best services provided ample amounts of documentation, including tutorials and FAQs, to make your journey into the world of PaaS a painless one.

We also reviewed each service on its customer support options, ranging from the documentation mentioned above to live help via email or telephone.

Summary
Whether you’re looking to launch a web application without hiring a full IT department, or you’re in IT and you just want to be sure you can handle large traffic spikes, a cloud hosting service can help you sleep at night, knowing your latest creation is running as it should.

The leader in the emerging platform-as-a-service industry is Heroku, an extensible and well-connected cloud hosting platform that makes deploying and managing applications in several popular languages…